June 2015 FEW Women’s Start-up Club Recap: What You Should Know About Social Media Marketing and Internet Security

FEW Women’s Start-up Club Meeting – June 2, 2015

Recap: What You Should Know About Social Media Marketing and Internet Security

When Daphne first joined Canning Professional a year ago, the company only had a website with very little presence on the social media.

The social media becoming one of her responsibilities, she had tried different platforms and realized that Facebook was too personal and it was impossible to follow up on Twitter everyday, which lead to the conclusion that a company page on LinkedIn was the best choice for her company’s targeted audience and objective that they wanted to achieve.

Canning Professional’s LinkedIn company page started from a network of employees who then expanded the connection through their contacts and by getting people to like your posts.

Daphne also set out a strategy for posting – frequency (one post every Friday), type of post, purpose of the post and the time you want to spend on posting etc. She sometimes posted video and articles on related topics or information on social events and the LinkedIn network grew organically.

Having a LikedIn Premium account allowed her to check who viewed the page as well as to search and target people. Google analytics also helped her analyze the access to the company’s website and how effective the social media strategy is working.

Nicola on the other hand exposed interesting facts about internet security and how we could increase security and protect our privacy better.

To do so, we first need to understand the current trends:

26 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020

More and more data moving to the cloud

Target of attack shifting from devices to data and identity (your location, purchasing habit, data about you – you are the commodity)

80% of apps are freemium (basic product / service provided for free of charge and premium functionality / virtual goods are charged)

There are indeed 307 threats every minutes!

So how can we go about protecting ourselves?

First of all, we need to review our passwords.

Too many people use most common passwords such as… “password” or “123456”! A password should be a combination of letters and numbers, never a single word. Also you should never use the same password for different accounts or share your password with others.

You also need to change your passwords frequently, ideally every 60 to 90 days, which is the time it takes to break a long and strong password. When it asks for your mother’s maiden name or date of birth, don’t put the actual name or date, because it’s too easy to find them on Facebook etc. If it’s too difficult to memorize all the different passwords, we can use a password manager.

Before we click, we need to “stop, think and connect”. The STOP THINK CONNECT organization’s website has a variety of ongoing campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and other social media: http://www.stopthinkconnect.org/. You also need to close down the browser and clear the data / erase the history regularly to protect the data about you.

In fact, the top 3 ways to get phished are 1. emails, 2. texts and 3. social media. Never send personal information by email a and don’t press “unsubscribe” button when you receive newsletters that you didn’t sign up for yourself.

Another thing you need to be careful is the apps you download. Here is a blog with tips on how to protect yourself from bad apps: https://blogs.mcafee.com/consumer/how-to-avoid-bad-apps. You can also change settings of the apps to avoid releasing too much of your information.

The same goes for the social media and you can fine tune your social media privacy:https://medium.com/un-hackable/fine-tune-your-social-media-privacy-71f2f6cf0d82. Another threat on social media is when someone else creates a fake LikedIn or Facebook account pretending to be you. It’s not possible to have it taken down and you will thus end up losing your reputation when someone else start contacting your contacts pretending to be you. It’s very difficult to get the credibility back when your reputation online is lost.

You also need to be careful with what you post on social media so as not to give away too much information about yourself. Or let other people negatively impact you or your company’s pages.

Lastly, you should be protecting all your devices by security software, including your mobile phones and Apple computers which are believed to be virus-free. There are actually security software that could cover unlimited number of devices.

After all these scary facts, all the attendees obviously went home and changed all their passwords!